Technology

Work Is Hell

There's an old saying: "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps." In Iraq, you might just have to be crazy. These guys certainly are. Zipping around an active war zone setting up satellite dishes? I don't care how good the money is — I'll pass.

Rudeness Toward Pundits

This morning on CNN's Reliable Sources, Mary Katharine Ham, a blogger at townhall.com, contested Ariana Huffington's claim that the problem of rude or threatening comments on blogs "is not about right-left."

I disagree just a little bit. I think it is easy to say that this is a problem of both sides without realizing that there — despite Arianna's obvious comportment and elegance on TV, that there are some serious monkeys hanging from the rafters over on the left side of the blogosphere.

And Michelle Malkin has been getting the C-word and the W-word in her in-box for years. And the same folks who wish for Cheney to be assassinated online are saying, you know, that Condi is a — is brown sugar or, you know, a house slave.

So I think that they — there really is a problem on the left side of the blogosphere…

It's funny, but just this morning, I found some rudeness here. And here. Not to mention here. And even in the comments to one of Ham's own blog posts, here.

But did you really expect someone like Ham to give up the chance to take a partisan swack at the left? Ahhh, no.

New Laptop

I got a new Thinkpad T60 a week back, and as I am wont to do, I spent a whole lot of time getting it set up just so, which this time means a dual-boot machine with XP and Fedora Core 6. I've posted my install diary (minus all the cursing) in case this will help anyone else save a few cycles.

But I Like My VOIP

So Vonage, and by extension, the rest of the VOIP world, seems to have a problem: the technology used to connect their network to the phone system is chock full of Verizon-owned patents. Oops.

It's unclear what this means for Speakeasy, my VOIP provider, but now I'm not so concerned about its recent acquisition by Best Buy. When it comes to litigation and negotiation, bigger is better.

Promises, Promises

I'm not sure quite what to think about the proposed XM-Sirius merger, but as an XM customer I do want things go smoothly if there the merger does happen. I already have 2 XM radios (including one built in to a fairly expensive piece of stereo equipment), and I'm not looking to replace those any time soon.

So, in an effort to put the minds of customers like me at ease, XM sent out a letter a few days ago that said:

Rest assured that any radios or other equipment that you currently use will be fully supported, both before and after we create the new company. In fact, following the merger, we expect that existing radios will be able to receive a mix of programming from both services. There will be no obligation to buy a new radio. And, as always, we will honor all existing multi-year subscription plans.

Now, there is some artful language here, such as using "we expect" instead of "we will". And of course customers aren't obligated to buy new equipment, but that just means they can't legally compel me, not that I won't have to if I still want to get the signal I'm paying for. But this clever word play wasn't clear enough for the lawyers, apparently, who have more delineated notions of what constitutes a promise. So note the fine print (the very small and hard-to-read fine print) on the back:

The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in the forward-looking statement: general business and economic conditions; the performance of financial markets and interest rates; the ability to obtain governmental approvals on a timely basis; the failure of Sirius and XM shareholders to approve the transaction; the failure to realize synergies and cost-savings from the transaction or delay in realization thereof; the businesses of Sirius and XM may not be combined successfully…

Etc. etc. I know it's just boilerplate, but the fact is that XM is giving themselves about a dozen ways out of their pledges, including such handy catch-all excuses like "operating costs", which they can use if they have to spend any money at all to make their stuff work. The combination of false promises on the front taken back by the legalese on the back doesn't leave me very optimistic. Better if they hadn't said anything at all.

Fingers Crossed

I use Speakeasy for my DSL service, and with a few exceptions, I've been happy with the service and the quality. I'm glad a friend gladly recommended it to me in the first place, and I've recommended it to others.

Learning today that Speakeasy was just bought by Best Buy, I hope all of the above will still be true six months from now. My Best Buy experiences have ranged from mediocre to WFT, which isn't particularly encouraging. Here's hoping that in this case I'm not disappointed.

Geeks for Kucinich

Wow, I'll say one thing about the Kucinich campaign — they don't hire anyone who isn't a true believer in the cause. Here's an email I received this morning:

In the upcoming days, you'll notice some changes in our website. As part of this new look, we have moved the user log-in box to the Forum area of the website. You can find it easily by using the pull-down menu for Forum-Chat Room Users at the top of the page.

Those who told lies to take us into war should be held accountable under the U.S. Constitution and at the International Criminal Court.

We hope that you will be as pleased as we are with the new design. It is our goal to always improve your experience.

Now that's some kind of message discipline.

WhiteHouse.gov Redesign

WhiteHouse.gov just got a facelift, so let's take a quick look at the new homepage.

Design: I'm not a fan. It's too boxy, too monochromatic, and uses whitespace really poorly. For the most part, the text is too small, except for the second box in the center column where it is inexplicably larger. Overall, the design comes across as cramped and amateurish.

Features: According to White House website boss David Almacy, there's nothing new to see here. The changes that were made were intended, among other things, to highlight the AV and RSS features. These sections, however, don't seem to have made it into the main navigation yet. Video and photos aren't linked from most of the interior pages; podcasts and RSS are linked from every page, but only in a jumble of extra stuff next to the search box. There is a nice integration of audio and video with the text-based stories in some of the section archives, but too often, a video or audio link lands you on a blank page with an embedded player — not the nicest presentation. And the RSS feeds are oddly organized.

Standards: Viewing the HTML source, it's like a trip back to 1999 — tables, tables, everywhere. The HTML doesn't validate, either — a whopping 127 errors! Lots of careless closing tag problems, but lots of other errors that are reflective of amateur hour: two title tags in the head; ids being reused, etc. I don't think the developers bothered to validate the HTML, but given their apparent skill level, they really should have.

The markup is littered with inline styles combined with 22 1/2 sets of font tags (yup, an end tag is missing). There is also an external style sheet with doesn't validate (although the error is a simple typo). The style declarations themselves don't seem to have a standard unit of measure — px mixed with em mixed with font-size keywords — which make them very confusing.

Conclusion: The whitehouse.gov team really should have taken some extra time to get more of this stuff right. There is certainly potential here. There are some nice design elements on some of the interior pages, and this site has multimedia content too burn. But it's handicapped by spaghetti code and the lack of a unifying aesthetic vision. These are common problems with large sites, to be sure — but they are solvable with effort. So I wonder — why aren't they being solved here?

Famous Enough for Spam

I've always been a little disappointed when I don't get the latest and greatest spam email. I think the Nigerian scam was already several years old before I got my first, for example. But I guess I've finally made the big time: I did get this one yesterday. Ah, the perils of fame.

Google's Coming to Town

Well, actually they're coming to Lenoir, about an hour north of Charlotte, but it's all the same. By the time you get out to Charlotte's outer suburbs, you might be closer to there than here.

Google's getting about $100 million in incentives to invest $600 million to create only 210 jobs, but those jobs will pay about double the county's average, which doesn't sound so bad. I'm usually opposed to big tax giveaways like this, but I'm reserving judgment for now. Fingers crossed.